Science-fiction readers devoted to the work of Isaac Asimov, that elder statesman of the field, will enjoy [In Memory Yet Green]…. Those familiar only with his popularizations of science or those who don't know his work at all will probably not like the book and may even wonder what moved him to write it.

Autobiography is as close to impossible as art can be and two sorts of falsification are common: the bare recital of facts, in which the shape of a life gets lost, and the imposition of a novelistic "theme" from the outside….

Asimov has chosen the bare-facts route; after his childhood memories (which are charming) the book becomes a fairly dry list of professional facts and a considerable number of personal ones which ought to be more interesting than they are (Asimov is surprisingly candid about a good many things) but which remain uninterpreted and hence unconnected. Either the author does not want to make the effort to treat this vast mass of material as something that demands interpreting or else he modestly regards this work as merely a mine of information for some future second-stage biographer.

Where time has provided the interpretation, Asimov accepts it, and, in his account of his childhood, the young Isaac emerges as a distinct and delightful personality—as sunny, playful, and sensible as Asimov's own persona as a writer of nonfiction…. There is much fascinating material here about the lives of East European Jewish immigrants in the New York of the '20s and '30s, about the small businesses which drained the time and energy of whole families. (p. 1)

A third-person biographer might dig much out of this book: Asimov's sheltered childhood and adolescence, his isolation …, his situation as a favored child, his unselfconscious precocity, and his matter-of-fact training in work and the enjoyment of work. What is not here—possibly because Asimov is not conscious of how much he differs from other people in this respect—is an explanation of the extraordinary imaginativeness that produced his fiction, or the corresponding quality in that peculiar group of eccentric and poverty-stricken youngsters who created science fiction's Golden Age in the 1940s. The hard-working, precocious, naive young man described here could well have written Asimov's nonfiction. But the writer of such works as "Nightfall" or the Foundation series (two of the classics for which Asimov is famous) is not in this book.

Nor is he represented by much in Opus 200, a sampler of Asimovian fiction and nonfiction culled from the author's second 100 books. (Yes, he works hard.) Opus 200 emphasizes non-fiction—somewhat grayly—and of the fiction the best is an excerpt from his recent novel, The Gods Themselves, a charming, recent story called "Good Taste," and two good science-fiction mystery stories ("Light Verse" and "Earthset and the Evening Star"). (pp. 1, 5)

Asimov still knows where he's going, but the subjective alchemy that enables him to know (and to get there) is never revealed in In Memory Yet Green. It remains a useful, limited, special-audience volume rather than the fascinating human exploration it might have been. (p. 5)